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The Sirduino

Introducing the Sirduino: A board of many Hats.The Sirduino is an open source, Arduino compatible electronics learning tool powered by Atmel's XMEGA family of processors.

Why the Sirduino?

What if you could easily put more than one shield on an Arduino? What if you knew that there weren't going to be hardware conflicts? We saw the need to create a more flexible, more capable electronics development board that is easy to use and inexpensive.Our concept is to mix and match and do more!We have created a board that easily connects the functionality of up to 5 expansion boards. We call these expansion boards Hats. We have designed the Hats so that any combination of them can be used simultaneously without the worry of hardware conflicts.

We found that while the Arduino's ease of use is tremendous, it's expandibility is limited. So we created a device that is more powerful than the Arduino MEGA, yet has a price point comparable to the Arduino Uno.

Sirduino vs. Arduino

The Sirduino can have up to five Hats.The Arduino can have just one shield. The five expansion slots means 5x functionality of a standard Aduino right out of the box!

If you have an Arduino Uno with 10 shields you have 10 different combinations of hardware.
If you have a Sirduino with 10 hats you have over 250 unique combinations of hardware! Plus there is some IO to spare!

Every Sirduino has a general purpose button and a reset button, Arduinos only have a reset button.

The Sirduino has 100 thou spacing for easy prototyping. Arduinos do not.

The Sirduino has native USB, the Arduino Uno does not.

The Sirduino has 4 on board DACs, the Arduino has none.

Sirduino has 78 GPIO, the Arduino has 20.

The Sirduino has 16 analog pins, the Arduino has 6.

The Hats (so far..)

How do you 'Duino?

The wonderful music in these videos was provided by a very talented musician by the name of Mikaela Davis. If you like what you hear, please check out more of her music on Spotify, as well as the link below to her Band Camp page.

Risks and challenges

With all projects, there are inherent risks involved and this project is no different. There are basically 3 challenges that we need to overcome.

The first has to do with the availability of the Processor. The ATXMEGA128A1U is a new part, and it's availability is limited right now. There is currently a 3 month lead time. This is why we have a promised delivery date of May. We will order the processor as soon as our project is funded.

While those parts are on order, we will work on the next challenge, which is to finish the Arduino bootloader port to this processor and also to write libraries for all of our hats so that you can start your fun as soon as you receive the Sirduino.

The last challenge is to finish up the development of all of our other hats that are in development. These hats include, but are not necessarily limited to, Servo Control, Motor Drive, Prototyping, Ethernet, WiFi. Accelerometer, GPS, GSM, and Character Display Hat. Basically, we would like for the Sirduino with accompanying Hats to be as functional as any Arduino/Shield combination that you can buy. The development of these Hats may not be complete by the time we ship the Sirduino to you, but we hope to have them completed as soon as we can.

FAQ

The Sirduino and the hats are 3.3v parts so level conversion needs to be done. Also most Shield libraries are coded exclusively for the Atmega processors so they will probably need to be ported to the Xmega. So the short answer is no but the long answer is yes with a whole bunch of work. We would like to be able to easily support existing Shields but we haven't got there yet.

We have been using the Xmegaduino project. Its a fork from the main Arduino IDE. The project is a port of the Arduino IDE, core, libraries and bootloader to support the Atmel XMEGA family of chips.
https://github.com/akafugu/Xmegaduino

All of the demos were created using this software with the definitions for the Sirduino.

It is also easy to write applications through Atmel Studio. This is a free IDE and compiler from Atmel that is based off based off Visual Studio.

There are two ways to upload code to your Sirduino. One is a PDI programmer and the other is a USB bootloader.

Currently you can upload in the Arduino IDE with a PDI Programmer. The Atmel DFU bootloader works very well but unfortunately is not compatible with the Arduino IDE. We are currently working on a port of a USB bootloader that you allow you to program directly through the Arduino IDE with only a USB cable.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge $5,000 or more
About $5,000

For this pledge amount, we will come to your school and put on a seminar on the Sirduino for your class. This will include a 2-3 hour long lesson on how to build a predetermined project (depending on difficulty). Each class will receive 30 Sirduinos along with the hats that will be required for their particular project to keep. Age appropriate lesson plans and projects will be determined with the help of educators. Continental United States only.